Anyone But Rich (Anyone But..., #1)(43)

“Oh,” I said quietly.

“Right?” Rich asked.

The childlike grin on his face made me smile. I couldn’t help it. He looked exactly like a kid showing his friend a prized card collection.

“So you’re into dinosaurs?” I asked. “I thought that whole thing about Cade touching your dinosaur bones at the airport was a weird inside joke.”

His grin faltered a little. “I mean, it’s not like I’m obsessed.” He shrugged and looked at his feet. It was the first time I’d ever seen Richard King look self-conscious, and it was adorable. “It’s more like a hobby, I guess.”

I looked up at the bones of a pterodactyl dangling from the ceiling. “I think it’s actually pretty cool. Most rich guys collect cars or something. This is unique.”

He was smiling again, and some of the self-consciousness had already melted away. He led me deeper into the room, where stacks of what looked like dressers or maybe wooden filing cabinets were lined up against the wall. He pulled one of the thin drawers out, and I saw it was actually a glass display case full of tiny bones. “I’ve got some insects, too, if you want to see,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if laughing would offend him, so I just smiled and nodded. For the next hour, I listened to Rich talk about dinosaurs, prehistoric times, common misconceptions about which dinosaurs actually coexisted, and even a brief rant on what most movies got wrong. If I’d been asked to list the million most exciting conversation topics I could think of an hour ago, I was pretty sure dinosaurs wouldn’t have cracked the list. But Rich was mesmerizing to watch. For a little while, he didn’t seem so far out of reach. I could forget all the reasons I should have been about as compatible with him as oil is with water. He was just a man talking about something he loved, and when everything was stripped away, I could see the real Richard King,

Somewhere between the topic of feathers versus scales and why raptors would’ve likely been great pets, I’d started to fall for him, and it didn’t feel like one of those times when you accidentally kick a stair on the way up and have to catch yourself. It was more like trying to walk down a waterslide while wearing an inflatable rubber suit. I was falling, sliding, slipping—whatever you wanted to call it—and I was on a one-way collision course with Rich.

“Yeah,” Rich said. He had his hand on one of the leg bones of a massive dinosaur. “It’s pretty cool.”

I laughed. “Calling it cool might be a stretch.”

He looked so suddenly and genuinely hurt that I laughed even harder.

“I was teasing you,” I said. “It probably sounds dumb, but I liked seeing that you care about all this stuff. It made you feel a little more human and less like somebody built you in a lab to seduce women.”

He wiggled his eyebrows and rubbed the dinosaur bone again. “You’re saying my dinosaur room is seducing you?”

I chewed on my bottom lip. “Maybe a little. All these hard bones start making a girl’s mind get all euphemistic, I guess.” I pressed my hand to my mouth. “Wow. I didn’t actually mean anything by that. It just sounded funny in my head, and then it sounded really dirty when I heard it out loud.”

“Dirty sounds good from you.”

The big room suddenly felt very small, and I was aware of how close we were standing. I could hear the thudding of the music from downstairs coming up through the floor and even the sound of splashing from the lake if I strained my ears. It was like reality had seeped back into the room through the cracks and crevices. For the hundredth time, I thought of Iris and Miranda. They’d pushed me to say something rash back in my classroom when they asked me to choose between them and Rich. Thinking of them made my stomach clench, and all the free easiness I’d felt moments ago seemed to wither up and die.

“Maybe we should get back out to the party,” I said. “It’s getting a little stuffy in here.”

Rich watched me for a few seconds, disappointment clear in his features. “Yeah, sure. Come on.”

Nick and Cade were standing outside the door to Rich’s dinosaur room when we opened the door. They nearly fell inside because they’d been leaning on the door.

“What the fuck?” asked Rich.

Cade straightened and brushed off his shirt. “Sorry. We were just trying to figure out if you actually managed to get a woman to sleep with you in your dinosaur room. Nick said it was impossible. I thought maybe if you came through with the right number of sexy dinosaur jokes, you could pull it off.”

“Sorry,” Nick said. “But dinosaurs don’t seem like the most ripe topic for jokes.”

“Uh,” Cade said. “Then tell me why dinosaurs have sex underwater?”

“They didn’t?” Nick said.

Cade sighed through his nose in frustration. “Just say why.”

“Why?” Nick asked in a monotone.

“You try keeping a thousand pounds of pussy wet.”

Rich and Nick groaned in unison. I was still coming to terms with the idea that the two of them had actually been listening from the door, but I still couldn’t help grinning a little.

“One more,” Cade said. “Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl using the bathroom?” When nobody seemed to want to indulge him by asking why, Cade answered anyway. “Because the p is silent.”